Customer retention is more critical to your business’s survival than you think. It’s the key to success in today’s competitive environment. When MBNA halved its customer defection rate, it boosted profitability by a whopping 125%. With so many options out there, companies that can’t retain customers won’t survive for long—no matter how innovative their products are. Increasing customer retention by just 5%, can boost profitability by 75%, according to a study by CustomerThermometer.
What’s more, repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
That’s a win-win for everyone.
Steps For Customer Service To Succeed:
One way to retain customers is to provide outstanding customer service. Outsourcing tech support is one way to do this. It enables you to focus more resources on enhancing customer experiences.
Below are seven additional steps you can take right now to boost customer service:
1. Create Seamless Service Experiences
Companies that provide poor customer service erect barriers between service experiences. That’s deadly. To provide phenomenal customer service, your company must eliminate these barriers between service experiences. That helps create seamless service experiences across standard and emerging channels used by customers.
2. Align Brand Strategies And Customer Experiences
About 80 percent of today’s companies believe they deliver superior customer service. But only 8% of their customers say they do. In other words, these companies are just talking the talk. To walk the walk, you must align brand strategies and customer experiences. FedEx is a great example of this.
3. Act Upon Customer Feedback
Companies often invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in generating customer feedback. But once they get it, they let it lie fallow. Customer-obsessed companies don’t let customer intelligence lie fallow. They act upon it. They use it to create better products, better services, better brand strategies & succeed in their industry segment.
Action Point: Review existing customer feedback projects. Determine what actions have been taken as a result. If nothing has been done, assign associates to key tasks. Then follow up.
4. Invest In Customer Experience to Succeed
Research shows that for every cent a company spends improving customer service, it generates an ROI of anywhere from 34% to a whopping 40%. Focus your strategy, energy, and budget on the enhancement of customer service.
5. Create Post-transaction Connections
Companies offering poor customer service tend to focus on pre-customer engagement activities almost exclusively. But customer-obsessed companies do more, a lot more. They also create post-transaction connections not only shortly after the transaction but also well after it.
6. Empower Employees To Own Customer “Moments”
Customer-obsessed companies empower their people to own customer “moments”. Take Vodafone, a British company. It used a social service strategy to overcome the negative feedback it experienced following a coverage gap.
This strategy gave service agents key customer information right when they needed it. That, in turn, generated 4x the number of positive customer interactions as before, as well as 2x the amount of customers using self-service.
7. Use Real-time Capture of Information
Using real-time capture of information furnishes you with a richer knowledge base about your customers. That makes it easier to predict what customers want ahead of time. That in turn enables you to decipher what customers want before they do—so you can be proactive instead of reactive.
To enhance its relationship with its clients (health care providers), GlaxoSmithKline did something innovative. It created a native iPad app for sales reps to track past and current customer behavior. This resulted in greater forecasting of their customers’ needs—all in a mobile environment, boosting sales and profitability.
These 7 steps can help you boost customer service—but only if you become customer-obsessed. Companies that become customer-obsessed typically generate 60% higher profits than their competitors.
In markets where survival of the fittest is the norm, increasing profitability is a must if you want to survive long term.
We, as trusted outsourced service desk providers, are eager to leverage our proven experience in delivering top-notch tech support to small and medium-size companies, exclusively for your benefit. Don’t hesitate to reach out to our sales team and request a quote.